One of the highlights of Maker Faire Xi’an was getting to see Maywa Denki. Their unique style of music involves crazy mechanical devices that are, at times, more whimsical than musical. They were selling a kit for one of the more amusing ones, a little dog called the BowGun.

I bought one of the kits thinking that it would be a nice little reminder of the event.

Building the kit was fairly easy, even though the instructions were in Japanese. There were a few items that would have probably been easier if I could have read the captions, but over all I was able to figure out what was going on.

There were a few clever bits, like how the trigger was held in its little pocket by tape. You place a sticker on the tape to keep it from sticking to the part of the trigger that needs to move.

I only had one issue with the kit. The wire that goes from the trigger to the bottom of the jaw was too short. This could easily have been because I swapped a part around on accident, but I’m not positive. It was easy enough to cobble something else together though.